Red-Green-Blue Composites from the GOES-R Series ABI

Abstract Meteorologists and others using the imagery from multispectral instruments for operational applications are often limited in time, making it impractical to carefully sift through every single available piece of information to understand the particular scene of interest. In addition, sometimes certain features are not readily apparent from single band imagery, but instead require taking the difference between two bands and scaling the output appropriately. These higher-order data manipulations can be onerous for a forecaster working under tight deadlines. The development of red-green-blue (RGB) imagery products involves an appropriately scaled single channel, channel difference, or other preprocessed combination of imagery assigned to each of the red, green, and blue color “components.” Combining these components results in a single image based on multispectral information. There are many RGBs currently being used operationally from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI); this chapter delves into the inner-workings of RGBs and their utility to the operational forecaster.